[This is a message I shared yesterday which
God used to touch hearts, so I send it out to you today as a Christmas card on
this Christmas Eve.]
“God’s love was
revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and
Only Son into the world so that we might live through
Him.” (1 John 4:9)
Is
your Christmas shopping done? If not,
you better do it—NOW! Honestly, I’m not that
keen on the shopping part of it, but I don’t mind the giving—in fact, I enjoy
it. I realize it is possible to over-do
it—that the commercialization of Christmas is a problem. But, the concept of giving is what Christmas
is all about, “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that
everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John
3:16) God took the greatest gift, wrapped Him in
love and sent His Son to earth to pay the greatest price to meet our greatest
need.
John
writes about this great gift of love when he speaks of THE ESSENCE OF LOVE.
“Dear friends,
let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has
been born of God and knows God. The one who
does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)
God
is the very essence of what love is all about, and love is the essence of who
God is for “love is from God” and “God is love.” Those were shocking concepts to John’s
readers. This was something new to the
ancient world. Pagan gods were cruel and
self-centered, filled with lust, anger and envy. Today the god of Islam, Allah, is a deity to
cringe before in terror, but not a god to love.
Only the Gospel presents the true God and that He is someone who loves
us!
Those
who respond to that love and receive Christ are born again, and we become the
children of God. Since our Heavenly
Father is love, His children will resemble Him and they will love also. We can profess to be children of God, but
only those who love prove it.
God
the Father is THE ESSENCE OF LOVE and God the Son is THE EXPRESSION OF LOVE.
“God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and
Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists
in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His
Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
(1 John 4:9-10)
What
does love mean? We have to ask, because
it is used in America
There
are ideas that are abstract which demand an illustration to enable us to
explain them well. It is hard to define
freedom with words alone, but just watch someone who has immigrated to this
land of liberty from an oppressive regime or harsh deprivation, and watch them
as they recite the Pledge of Allegiance as new citizens—you will understand
freedom. It isn’t easy to verbalize
beauty, but point to a mountain landscape covered in snow and you get the
picture. What is joy? Observe children on Christmas morning—eyes
sparkling, reflecting the light on the tree and hear them as they squeal with
delight, tearing through the gift wrap to the treasure inside—and we witness
joy.
What
about love? I will do more than express
with words what love is all about—I will point to a living example—Jesus
Christ! This is how “God’s love was
revealed,” John states. God loves
you—and all you have to do is look in a manger of straw, and observe a cross of
wood. Lying there is the gift of love in
a stable—the newborn Baby. Hanging there
is the gift of love on a cross—the man Jesus.
He
was born to die—that was His mission and it was motivated by love. The cross is the real Christmas tree. Those chubby little hands, so smooth and
soft, that reached as an infant for Mary would some three decades later be
pierced with cruel spikes as He would be nailed to a tree. He did it for you; He did it for me.
Knowing
God as THE ESSENCE OF LOVE and experiencing Jesus as THE EXPRESSION OF LOVE
enables is to encounter THE EFFECTS OF LOVE.
“Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one
another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God
remains in us and His love is perfected in us.
This is how we know that we remain in Him and He in us: He has given [assurance]
to us from His Spirit. And we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent His Son as the world’s Savior. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God —
God remains in him and he in God. And we have come to know and to
believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in
love remains in God, and God remains in him.
In this, love is perfected with us so that we may have confidence
in the day of judgment, for we are as He is in this world. There is no fear in love;
instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves
punishment. So the one who fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because He first loved us.
If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For the person who does not
love his brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen. And we have this command from
Him: The one who loves God must also love his brother.” (1 John 4:11-21)
John tells us that no on can see God—except as they
see Him in us. Is the word love the
identifying mark the world would use to describe Christians today?
Jerry Vines once shared a story, how years ago, a
missionary to the Navajo Indians came upon a sick woman who had been abandoned
by the tribe. Tenderly, the missionary
nursed her back to health. The old woman
wanted to now why she had done that. That’s
when the missionary told her about God’s love and asked her if she wanted to
trust in Jesus as her Lord and Savior.
She answered, “If Jesus is anything like you, I can trust Him
forever!”
Could that be said about you or me?
You may think—there are some people that I just
don’t think I can love. “You don’t know
how they hurt me.” The natural thing to
do is to retaliate—if not aggressively by counterattack, at least passively, by
shunning them. But, the child of God is
no longer to be directed by the old nature.
God has given us a new nature—the very nature of Christ! It is the Holy Spirit who generates this
heavenly love, (v.13). The result is
that we want others to know that God loves them and they too can be saved
(v.14-16).
Experiencing, embracing and expressing this love is
transformational—a blessing to others, but to ourselves as well. The more we understand the love of God, the
more we trust Him—and fear finds no space (v.17-18). It chases it away—fear supplanted by faith as
we know nothing can separate us from the love of God and that being the case
what can harm us?
“What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is
against us?
He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him
grant us everything?
Who can bring an accusation against God’s elect? God is the One who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the One who
died, but even more, has been raised;
He also is at the right hand of God
and intercedes for us.
Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or anguish or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
As it is written:
Because of You we are being put to death all day long; we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered.
No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Him who loved us.
For I am persuaded that not even death or life, angels or rulers,
things present or things to come, [hostile] powers, height or depth, or any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord!”
(Rom.8:31-39)
God’s love speaks louder than words (v.19-21). Love originated with God and if we love the
Father, we will love His children. It
will be spoken to be sure, but must also be shown—otherwise our speech is a
sham.
The
nature of a gift is that it is free to you because someone else has paid the
price. The gift of eternal life cost
Jesus His life, and so it is offered to us freely. Still I must reach out a hand of faith and
take it. Have you? If not, will you?
No comments:
Post a Comment